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Twain in Post-War Popular Culture
Since the 1970s, Japanese children have seen Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in many places other than the classroom. From the second half of the 1970s to the first half of the 1990s, “Tom Sawyer” and “Huck Finn” were broadcast nationally as full-length television animation series. 30 However, all three animations created for television drastically modified the originals. For instance, as in the translations immediately after the war, the 1976 animation series of Huckleberry Finn not only shows the protagonist as an egalitarian, righteous hero who has no hesitation in helping a runaway slave, but it also portrays Jim as an aggressive character who expresses dissatisfaction over discrimination. 31 The animations were clearly influenced by the image of African Americans during the civil rights movement. Even in the 1980 animation series of Tom Sawyer, some parts still indulge in refining the original, such as diluting the atrociousness of the killer Injun Joe. Still, by highlighting romantic interactions between Tom and Becky, which until then were mostly avoided in translations meant for children, the animation provides a liberated view of a loving relationship between children, quite unlike prewar translations and adaptations. 32 Furthermore, the 1994 animation of Huckleberry Finn almost entirely ignores the storyline of the original, making it a comical action fantasy, a trend in Japanese animations of that period. The runaway slave Jim does not make an appearance in this animation, and therefore, it does not deal with issues of discrimination or slavery at all. 33
Watching such animations, which largely ignore the spirit of the original works, made it difficult for common Japanese people, and children in particular, to gain a deep understanding of Twain’s works. However, it is not very productive to focus only on criticism based on the differences between the originals and the animations. Indeed, we must also pay attention to the constructive role these animations have played. In particular, these works were exported to other countries along with the general popularization of Japanese animation around the world, influencing the way Twain’s work was viewed internationally, including in the United States. In other words, Japan, which was the receiver until then, sent made-in-Japan Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to the United States after adding a distinct Japanese flavor to the originals. In a way, these animations helped give global dimensions to Twain’s works.
As indicated by the production of a very popular year-long TV animation series of Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer is often recognized in Japan as one of the most famous characters in American literature. However, most of the popular Japanese cultural versions of Tom Sawyer reflect stock images of this American boy. As he does in America, even in Japan Tom Sawyer usually signifies the boy’s world and, in particular, the spirit of freedom and adventure, courage, fist-fighting, and close ties among boys. At the same time, however, another Japanese work creatively challenges the norm of masculine images in Tom Sawyer’s world, Shin Takahashi’s Tom Sawyer (2007). 34 Yet even this work shares conventional views of Tom Sawyer. Although its locations and characters are all Japanese, very much as in the American original the story takes place in a rural village during summer, the young protagonists experience diverse outdoor adventures, and friendship is crucial in the narrative. However, as expected from a work originally serialized in a girl’s comic magazine, its description of the relationships between the sexes is very subtle and significantly emphasizes the female viewpoint. Unlike Twain’s original, the central figure of this adaptation is not a boy but a female college student. Consequently, the story primarily centers on her life and depicts the changes and growth she undergoes. This situation, the transformation of an adult through the stimulation of a Tom Sawyer-like character, does not appear to exist in other stories based on Tom Sawyer. Although Takahashi did not address the issue in a fully developed way, he did deal with sexuality, a subject Twain’s original almost completely neglects. In this way, Takahashi challenges certain conventional images of Tom Sawyer in his adaptation. As evidenced by the publication of the Italian edition of his Tom Sawyer in 2010, Takahashi’s creative interpretation of Twain’s notable work also stimulated global audiences. 35
Apart from the works mentioned in this essay, there are many others that have influenced Japanese people’s perception of Mark Twain. From the latter half of the 20th century, in particular, significant Japanese translations of Twain’s major works were published. From the 1960s to the 1970s, for instance, the influential translator Yoshio Nakano translated two of Twain’s darkest writings, The Mysterious Stranger and What Is Man? for the first time into highly readable Japanese. Nakano’s translations almost singlehandedly introduced neglected aspects of Twain’s writing in his later years. (It was later revealed that the editor of The Mysterious Stranger deceivingly altered Twain’s original manuscript, and Nakano’s translation of the work was still in press as of 2016.) Yoshio Katsuura and Hiroshi Okubo should also be credited for the introduction of Twain’s literary world to Japanese readers after the late 20th century. In particular, Katsuura’s translation of Twain’s short stories, published in three volumes in the 1990s, greatly contributed to introducing a number of lesser-known short pieces. In addition, Hiroshi Okubo dedicated a significant amount of his scholarly life to the translation of important works by Twain, including Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee, Joan of Arc, and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, to name a few. Fortunately, most of his translations were published in either paperback or digital editions, making them highly accessible to general readers even today.
Twain and his works were used and appeared in various kinds of mass media—popular fiction, newspaper and magazine articles, dramas, movies, TV commercials, computer games, Tokyo Disneyland, kamishibai (traditional Japanese picture card stories), and even Japanese rock music. Thus Twain’s influence on Japan spread over a wide spectrum of popular cultural arts. On stage, for instance, Tom Sawyer was adapted as a musical in 1987. 36 Big River, the Tony Award-winning musical adaptation of Huckleberry Finn, was also performed by leading Japanese stars in 1988, and a revival of this musical played in Tokyo in 2004. 37 The famous all-female musical group Takarazuka-kagekidan adapted Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in the 1990s. 38 A rock group called “Huckleberry Finn” made its debut in 1999. 39 Shrewd Japanese businesses do not ignore the market value of Mark Twain and his works. Nissin Foods employed Tom Sawyer for its massive advertising campaign for The Cup Noodle in 1987. The company declares “[Tom Sawyer] is the character which symbolizes Nissin Food’s spirit of enterprise and pioneer.” 40 Twain’s Hartford mansion was also used for the award-winning TV commercial of a Japanese house-building company. 41 Twain appeared in a best-selling ninja novel and helped the hero solve the secret of his treasure hunt. 42
These Japanese versions of Twain and his works show that the recipients of culture are not always passive. Japan often demonstrated its autonomy by transforming, distorting, and even rejecting some aspects of Twain and his work. Of course, in the process of these transformations and distortions, significant elements of the originals are sometimes lost. As we have seen in this essay, Japan repeatedly neglected Twain’s social satire and sometimes belittled Twain as an innocuous children’s novelist. Most of these versions tend to emphasize only one aspect of Twain, an image of nostalgia and adventurous spirit. In this sense, Japan might need more time to develop a deeper understanding of Twain. However, we do not need to be overly pessimistic about Twain’s future in Japan.

Summary and Keywords
Why have so many Japanese people been fascinated with one of the most distinctively “American” writers, Mark Twain? Over the past hundred years, Mark Twain has influenced Japanese culture in a variety of ways. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe claimed that Huckleberry Finn was one of the “roots of his inspiration as a writer” and called Huck one of the heroes who means the most to him in world literature. However, it was often necessary for Japanese writers to “Japanize” Twain’s works in accordance with the cultural and political norms of contemporary Japanese society. For instance, Kuni Sasaki’s Huckleberry Monogatari (1921), the first Japanese translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, significantly bowdlerized Huckleberry for Japanese juvenile readers, following the period’s genteel conventions of juvenile literature. In Jiro Osaragi’s samurai novel Hanamaru Kotorimaru (1939), an adaptation of Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, the elements of didacticism, rigid class hierarchy, and patriarchal relationships, all significant in contemporary imperial Japan, were particularly emphasized. During the American occupation after World War II, a number of Japanese juvenile translations of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn appeared. They not only idealized Tom and Huck as democratic American heroes, but also considerably tamed them out of concern that those untamed heroes might justify juvenile delinquency, which was common in the post-war moral confusion. In the sphere of Japanese popular culture, Twain is everywhere. Twain and the characters in his works frequently appear in popular science fiction, television commercials, musicals, repertory theaters, documentary films, and theme parks. An animated TV series depicting Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer achieved record-breaking popularity among Japanese children in the 1970s and 1980s. These popular cultural adaptations sometimes reflected the changing trend of Japanese juvenile television anime and the development of themes in late 20th-century Japanese society, such as the empowerment of women and increasing awareness of the necessity to represent blacks.